Duff Salter's shoulder was touched as he ceased to speak, and he found young Calvin Van de Lear behind him.
"I have followed you out to the country," said the young man, howling in the elder's ear, "because I wanted to talk to you aloud, as I couldn't do in Kensington."
Duff Salter drew his storied ivory tablets on the divinity student, and said, crisply, "Write!"
"No, old man, that's not my style. It's too slow. Besides, it admits of nothing impressive being said, and I want to convince you."
"Jericho! Jericho!" sneezed Duff Salter. "Young man, if you stun my ear that way a third time I'll knock you down. I'm deaf, it's true, but I'm not a hallooing scale to try your lungs on. If you won't write, we can't talk."
With impatience, yet smiling, Calvin Van de Lear wrote on the tablets,
"I never saw a ghost of anything in my life. What men?"
"Several people. Some say it's but one that has been seen. Zane's ghost walks, anyway, in Kensington."
"The fishwomen and other superstitious people say, because their murderers have not been punished."
"Those who survived and profited by the murder, of course?"
"Jer-ri-choo-woo!" exploded Duff Salter. "Young man," he wrote deliberately, "you have an idle tongue."
"Friend Salter, you are blind as well as deaf. Do you know Miss Podge Byerly?"
"She's common! Agnes Wilt uses her as a stool-pigeon. She fetches, and carries, and flies by night. One of the school directors shoved her on the public schools for intimate considerations. Perhaps you'll see him about the house if you look sharp and late some night."
Duff Salter was decidedly red in the face, and his grave gray eyes looked both fierce and convicted. He _had_ seen a school director visiting the house, but thought it natural enough that he should take a kind interest in one of the youthful and pretty teachers. The deaf man returned to his pencil and tablets.
"Do you know, Mr. Van de Lear, that what you are saying is indictable language? It would have exposed you to death where I have lived."
The young man tossed his head recklessly. Duff Salter now saw that his usually sallow face was flushed up to the roots of his long dry hair and almost colorless whiskers, as if he had been drinking liquors. Forgetting to use the tablets, Calvin spoke aloud, but not in as high a key as formerly:
